In 1999, Amit Chaudhuri moved back to Calcutta, the city in which he was born. It was a place he had loved in his youth & the place he had made his name writing about. But upon his return he discovered that the Calcutta of his imagination had receded & another had taken its place. Lyrical, observant & profound, Calcutta is a personal account of two years (2009-2011) spent in one of the least known
- yet greatest
- cities of our time by one of our leading novelists. Using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, & towards the twenty-first, when
- utterly changed
- it seems to be on the verge of another turn. Along the way he evokes all that is most particular & extraordinary. From the homeless & the working class to the old, declining haute bourgeois; from the new malls & hotels to old houses being destroyed by developers; from politicians on their way out to the city`s fitful attempts to embrace globalisation, Calcutta brings a multifarious universe to life.